Valley View Casino is connecting with guests and team members. By David Ross
California has more tribal casinos than any other state and San Diego County has more than any other county in the Golden State. At or near the top of any listing of the best casino hotels in San Diego County is Valley View Casino & Hotel, set in the small, picturesque and rural community of Valley Center. It proudly lists itself as “San Diego’s Favorite Casino.”
The resort recently completed a $50 million renovation. This small but luxurious hotel has always been renowned for its floor-to-ceiling windows and 520-square-foot, deluxe rooms with awesome vistas of Palomar Mountain— which is often covered foot to crown with snow in winter months.
The rooms feature no parking fees, no resort fees and no taxes. The hotel’s unique infinity pool also has sweeping views of the mountain range. Recent renovations included 65,000 square feet of additional casino floor, which has consistently earned the title “Best Slots” for San Diego County.
Bruce Howard, who has twice been general manager of Valley View Casino— the second time for the last 19 years—has a philosophy that seems to work very well: “We keep putting money back into the business and doing a little more for our team members.”
The San Pasqual Tribe, specifically the San Pasqual Casino Development Group Inc., has always been very supportive of Howard and his team. “We have a group of tribal members who are not afraid to reinvest,” said the GM. “If we do need it, we present it to the board. Every Monday we meet. I don’t think they have ever turned us down for anything we thought was important enough to bring to them in 19 years. “I love the tribal members. I love the team members. We’ve gotten the chance to do it the way that my 40 years of experience taught me how to do it,” says Howard.
One instance would be the emphasis on food and beverage. The casino’s flagship fine-dining restaurant, the Black & Blue Steakhouse & Lounge— where you’ll find decadent steaks and seafood with a 3,300-gallon seawater aquarium in the background— recently underwent a “sea change.” As Howard puts it, “Our Black & Blue Steakhouse is pretty much all-new. Our entire menu is new. The makeup of the restaurant is new. A little more sophisticated and a little more modern, but still everyone can feel at home in summer clothes. Or you want to put on a jacket or you want to put on some jeans and a nice T-shirt, you’re all fine. It’s probably one of the finest steakhouses I’ve been involved with—and as you know I grew up at Caesars Palace. I was the food and beverage director there before moving on to operations.”
Black & Blue has been favorably compared to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, with one reviewer exclaiming it was “but a little cheaper price-wise.” It’s famous for its surf and turf. The cowboy ribeye is more than enough beef for most hearty eaters.
The casino also has a very popular, all-you-can-eat buffet for Players Club Blue Card members. It features Maine lobster flown across the continent. If you like live music, the Main Stage bar has live entertainment just about every night until 2 a.m.
I sat down recently with the general manager for a few minutes to talk about what’s new. Howard credits the resort’s success during those 19 years to “1,030 teammates for most of that time—along with a fabulous advertising and marketing company [InnoVision Marketing Group]. But I think we have always been able to connect to our guests, and connect to our team members, in a little more personal way and a little more specific way.” The emphasis on food and beverage, says Howard, means that “We are known far and wide as having the finest offerings in casinos for all different types of food. We’ve concentrated in the last six to eight months on improving all of those restaurants—both through all-new menus, a little more seasonal on all the menus, some renovations on two of our premier restaurants. Our all-day restaurant—The Café—went through a renovation about three months ago.
It was followed right on its heels by what we consider the finest fine-dining restaurant in San Diego, as do the readers of the Union-Tribune newspaper, who gave us some nice awards recently.”
Valley View Casino in November 2023 was given the annual Top Workplace Award and national honors for “Employee Appreciation” and “Professional Development” by the Union-Tribune. Six hundred employees participated in the survey, according to Tribal Gaming & Hospitality, which reported: “With their very impressive 62 percent overall response rate and an outstanding 82 percent satisfaction rating, Valley View Casino & Hotel’s team members have spoken loud and clear about their positive experiences within the organization.”
Among the renovations were two additional bars. “We were asked by our guests who really like our video poker machines—and there are a lot of singles, either widows or widowers or whatever may be the case in San Diego—and many single people like to sit at a bar, rather than at a table by themselves. They like mingling with fellow guests, mingling with our bartenders and cocktail servers,” said Howard. “We’re now up to six bars, which is a good number for a 100,000-square-foot casino. We are up to 2,030 of the latest and greatest slot machines. Our slot floor is very dynamic, very upbeat. All of the latest manufacturers equal in my opinion to anybody in California or the Las Vegas Strip.”
Valley View was the first San Diego casino to unveil a roulette game, called Richer Roulette, a variation on the traditional game. It’s not actual roulette, because in California roulette is based on cards, not a rolling ball. But it brings the feel of a Vegas roulette game with the Richer Bonus side bet—which adds to the excitement. For those who like their gaming without tobacco smoke, Valley View also has a non-smoking casino space with 400 slot machines and a non-smoking video poker bar. “We keep putting back money in the business and we keep doing things for our team members,” said Howard. “We just opened a $20 million administration building. For years our team—a lot of whom don’t work in the casino—were using mobile units. We now have a beautiful office building that houses 100 team members—from finance, from human resources, from security, from gaming, and from food and beverage. That opened up about six months ago as well.”
Next on the list is a “brand-new, team-member-specific parking lot,” said Howard. “So, instead of parking on level one of our six-story public garage, we are now going to be able to give back the first floor of our garage to our guests. This will open up 200 more spaces for them, which we need at least two to three times a week. That will help us and help concentrate all of our team members in one secure area, with a covered parking for them. That will open in mid-September.”
Additionally, they remodeled the hotel rooms over to the last room. That’s been done in little steps. “We do one quarter at a time,” said Howard. “One quarter we did the lobby. One quarter we redid the carpeting. One quarter we redid all the furniture. All the bedding is new now.” He says, “I get comments all the time that people cannot believe that this hotel is 15 years open.” He gives kudos to the team headed by Howard Silver, vice president of food and beverage, “and our hotel team, our tremendous leadership team. It’s a beautiful hotel and everybody likes it.”
The hotel remains “boutique” with 96 oversized rooms that are 520 square feet and 12 which are 1,000 square feet. “We haven’t added a new hotel tower but we’ve been concentrating where most of our customers are, in the casino and bar, and in doing more for our team members,” he said. “Getting them a new garage has been very exciting.”
Howard started at Valley View Casino in 2003 and was then in 2007 offered general managership of a new resort on the Las Vegas Strip. He was general manager of the pre-opening, until the financial crisis of the Great Recession hit and he was among those let go.
Coincidentally the general manager who had replaced Howard in 2007 at Valley View had moved along as well. The board of directors called and asked him to come back “and the timing was just right.” Howard adds, “It was two years and one day after leaving when I was asked to come back. I have been here 19 years but it’s been a total of 21 years, if that makes any sense. I have the distinction of being the sixth and eighth general manager of the same casino.”
Valley View is a special place to Howard. “What’s special is the openness of our board of directors,” he said. He and his CFO are the only non-tribal members of the board and have the same voting rights. “So maybe it’s the trust factor that makes it so special,” he concludes. “Maybe it’s the understanding of my responsibilities to the 1,030 team members, 150 owners and three million guests a year that makes it feel special.”
He muses, “I’ve been fortunate enough to be at 11 casinos and I’ve loved them all. But my first and my last will always be the two best. I was at Caesars Palace for 11 years, then I traveled all over the country and then was at Valley View for the better part of 19 years—and this will be the last one for me. The first and the last were the best for me for a lot of the same reasons.”
Howard experiences a “good feeling everywhere in the building. Everybody trusts me and I trust them, and we give everybody a lot of support. People like Ric Militi and Alanna Markey [of InnoVision Marketing Group] of our advertising division, started their own company, and today made us their only casino client in California. And they bring 60 and 70 other clients that they have. So I take trust very seriously.”
Trust, he says, “is really an allowance for the executive team and the leadership, and the board of directors just gives us support. We have a group of tribal members and owners who are not afraid to reinvest.”
That’s not always the norm, whether among tribal or commercial gaming. “A lot of people decide to always put things off. We don’t do that here. It’s a different feeling here. I love the Las Vegas Strip. Caesars will always be near and dear to my heart—but I’m a small-town and small-business kind of guy, and not necessarily for the public corporation. It’s more of a family business.”
Howard lives close to work in Valley Center. “People ask me how far away I am from work and I say ‘I’m three songs away,’ I listen to three songs and I pull in! Valley Center is booming with the addition of 700 homes but it still has that quaint, quiet, picturesque feel to it, and it’s just been a great place for my wife and I to live for all these years.”
Would he call Valley View a “local casino” rather than one marketing to Los Angeles and the greater Southern California market? Howard answers, “It is local, it’s just that our locale is defined as 50 to 60 miles. Whereas in Las Vegas, local is always 10 or 12 miles. So we do draw from three directions.”
He points out that there isn’t much east of Valley View except the desert. “But we do draw from the south, we do draw from the north and as far as Orange County, and a good demographic for us is outside San Diego County, places like Temecula.” Howard adds, “We’re very proud of the fact that we draw from the south too, where there are probably five casinos. To people driving here, we’ve got a great draw from the west. From San Marcos, Oceanside, all those areas. But I try to take the best of what I call ‘local casinos,’ which is values and great food, and with my experiences of the Las Vegas Strip, where people do want things certainly sophisticated.
“But yes, we’re a local casino, within an hour in all directions. It’s a 20 minute drive to find locals in Vegas. We’re a pretty good draw from everywhere within 90 minutes of us.”
Howard concludes, “It’s a fun, relaxed place and in that sense a little more local, less formal. We were a little more formal on the Strip. Everybody at Caesars wore a dark suit and white shirt, plain tie, and here we get to hobnob with the guests. They like that. A little more casual, in a good way. A little more California.”
Casino Life Magazine Team would like to thank Bruce Howard for taking the time for this interview with us earlier this year.
***This exclusive feature interview was originally published in Casino Life Magazines September 2024 edition Issue 170***
